I got into music relatively late in life. My parents didn’t want me to “waste my time” on frivolous stuff like the arts, and so it wasn’t until high school that I actually got introduced to the concept of performing music.
Just as a brief moment of context, my high school had three different art streams: Drama, Music, and Visual Arts, and every student had to pick one. There was a really cute girl I liked in the Drama stream, but there were two in Music, and so I picked music. No regrets there, although I do sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had pursued one of the other streams… just curiosity more than anything.
Anyway, my parents also didn’t like music aside from opera and the occasional Christmas carol. My brother used to listen to rock and/or roll, and when he moved out in protest of my father’s utterly draconian parenting my parents decided that music (and roleplaying games) were the cause. So no pop music for me.
I mention this only because I love music. Not all music, and definitely not at all volumes, but I have wide ranging and diverse tastes. A lot of it not in English or without vocals at all, because those help me write.
I can’t listen to English songs when I write because the lyrics work themselves into my writing. A lesson I learned in university the first time around.
So I listen to Japanese and Korean pop music (J-Pop and K-Pop respectively), Mongolian rock, Chinese ballads. I listen to instrumental bard songs and French love songs. I listen to Swedish punk and German alternative. Just about anything as long as it’s catchy and got a solid hook. I’m a simple man, I like simple music.
The music I’ve listened to most over the last decade is almost certainly the Skyrim soundtrack… the decade before that it would’ve been the music from the Final Fantasy series or Katamari Damacy’s soundtrack. Good tunes, folks. Good tunes.
I hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!